


Before

by writerforlife



Series: Dualities [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-17 01:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14822445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerforlife/pseuds/writerforlife
Summary: "Bucky Barnes could pare his life down to two principles. He wanted to stay alive. He wanted Steve Rogers to stay safe and alive. He wasn’t good at sticking to those principles, mostly because the universe and Steve appeared to have other thoughts, but he clung to them."





	Before

**Author's Note:**

> You don't have to read the first work in the series to understand this one, but they can definitely function as a set!

Bucky Barnes could pare his life down to two principles. He wanted to stay alive. He wanted Steve Rogers to stay safe and alive. He wasn’t good at sticking to those principles, mostly because the universe and Steve appeared to have other thoughts, but he clung to them.  _ Keep yourself alive. Keep Steve alive.  _ Anything else was a bonus. 

He didn’t have anything against bonuses, not really—because in Brooklyn, bonuses were extra food and spare cash, and after the fall, bonuses were snippets of memory. It was only that he  _ knew  _ living off the bare minimum. It’s natural. 

In between never really worked. He functioned best in extremes. 

Poor and rich. 

Life and death. 

Before and after. 

It was best to forget middles. 

 

#

 

He remembered packing for a mission. The same mission he got captured, where Steve came to rescue him, where the end began, where the flames burned, where he could feel drugs coursing through him, where he thought  _ something’s wrong _ , where—

He was packing. Food. Cigarettes. Letters. Mostly from Steve. 

“What should I bring?” he asked a bunkmate. 

The man—because he can’t remember his name, only his words—grinned.

“Take what you can carry, soldier.”

 

#

 

Example: After. 

He woke up in Wakanda cured. Sort of. Cured enough to be a part of society. Cured enough for Steve to come to visit and kiss him like he isn’t going to break. 

The nightmares and memories and triggers and blood on his hands couldn’t touch him. 

_ Take what you can carry, soldier.  _

After, he wasn’t the Winter Soldier, wasn’t really even Bucky Barnes. Not the one that fell, at least. But Steve wasn’t the same Steve Rogers who chose to become Captain America. 

They were still  _ them.  _

#

 

Example: Before

Before he fell, before Steve was Captain America, before he knew a thousand ways to kill a man, before they became men out of time, they were just Steve and Bucky. 

Steve told him it’s wrong to romanticize it. It wasn’t romanticizing. He was stripping away what he didn’t need and took what he wanted

_ Take what you can carry, soldier.  _

He couldn’t carry Steve shivering under a mass of blankets, couldn’t carry sprinting out of corner stores with medicine tucked into his shirt, couldn’’t carry memories of hunger—for food, for Steve, for a purpose in life besides the docks—or desperation. He was a desperate man who did desperate things. 

He reminded himself of that, and took the good. 

Took his memories of kissing Steve, touching him, spending summers being truly careless, and ran before anyone could steal them. 

 

#

During?

(His therapist always made him talk about during)

He sobbed as they hacked away the rest of his arm. He counted days, counted the ways Steve could rescue him. Because if Steve was alive, Steve was coming. 

He tried to fight until they drew a newspaper down in front of him.

“Captain America is dead,” a handler—because they were called  _ handlers _ , like he was a fucking animal—spat. 

Which obviously meant Steve Rogers was dead, and Bucky only had one leg left. 

The he killed.  _ And killed. And killed. Tony Stark was angry at him. Maria and Howard Stark weren’t special. They were only names on a list. Names that cost Steve everything. _

Take what you can carry, soldier.

No, it was best to forget during. Before and after suited him fine. 

 

#

 

Sometimes his brain worked out of order. Steve was usually there to fix it. 

But sometimes Steve needed fixing.

He woke up breathless, shaking, trembling like he was fevered. He wasn’t. Bucky almost wished he was, because it would be easier to fix a fever. He wished Steve would talk to him instead of rolling over onto his side and continuing to shake. 

But Steve never said anything.

So Bucky folded himself around Steve, pressing his lips to the back of his neck and curling his arms over his torso. 

It works. 

 

#

 

“Tell me one thing about your dreams,” Bucky finally said

Steve laid on his back and stares at the ceiling. “I see you die over and over.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say. 

 

#

 

From his research, Bucky figured out a few things. Steve was the same self-sacrificing shit he’d always been when he awoke in the twenty-first century. But he was reserved. Too serious. Nobody ever saw Captain America smile. 

That was before Bucky.

After? After Siberia, after Wakanda?

Steve smiled. And that was enough. 

 

#

 

“I don’t want you to be another thing to feel guilty about,” Bucky blurted before Steve left Wakanda two days later. 

Steve smiled sadly. He did that a lot. Bucky wondered what the scrawny kid from Brooklyn would decide if he could see that sad smile. 

He wondered what a young Bucky Barnes would do. 

Of course, Steve never replied. 

 

#

 

T’Challa presents him with a new arm. 

_ Before he had a flesh one, after he had a metal arm. Before he had a metal arm, after he had no arm. Before he had _ —

Take what you can carry, soldier. 

Bucky knew what a new arm meant:

Trouble was coming, and so was Steve. 

Were they really so different?

 

#

 

“Did they surrender?” he asked Steve. 

Steve falls in at his side. Bucky knows what comes next. Nazis, HYDRA, aliens. An enemy’s an enemy; anything that will die when it’s shot can be a defeatable enemy. In that definition, Steve’s enemies think he’s an enemy. 

It’s a complicated circle.

Bucky’s better with bullets. He knows how to protect. 

_ Keep yourself alive. Keep Steve alive. _

Were his goals really so different? 

 

#

 

He remembered a night after they went dancing, after Steve picked a fight, after he intervened and took a few punches and kicks before the men got bored. 

It sounded like an after, but it was a before. 

Bucky sat on the rickety bed, towel slung around his neck, Steve kneeling between his legs with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a judgemental grimace. He swiped the soaked cloth across Bucky’s cheek not so gently—because Steve was small, but he sure as hell wasn’t  _ tender _ , because tenderness was a luxury—and chuckled humorlessly when Bucky hissed.

“Serves you right for getting in the middle.”

Steve had tried to fight three guys twice his size. Of course he got in the middle. 

“What were you thinking? They could’ve killed you.”

Could’ve killed Steve, too.

“How do you think I feel seeing you all banged up for me? You don’t have to defend my honor like I’m—”

“Shut up,” Bucky muttered and leaned down. 

His stinging cheek wasn’t the aftermath of getting his ass handed to him. It was the prologue to the first time he kissed Steve, and Steve kissed him back. 

 

#

 

After. 

A quiet lull always followed death. Bodies of Wakandans and aliens alike were sprawled across the ground. Bucky inhaled. A few yards away, Steve was talking to somebody. 

But something wasn’t right. 

 

#

 

One night, he found Steve sobbing in the bathroom of their room in Wakanda.

“I can’t take it,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I can’t watch you get hurt again and again. It shouldn’t bother me. But I saw you in the street and you didn’t know me, I had to  _ shoot _ you, you were suffering alone, Stark ripped your arm off, you went under again, and you still have nightmares. I can’t take you suffering. I can’t take losing you again. I don’t know what we’re paying for, Buck.”

He knows the feeling. What sin had they committed? When would it end, when would they finally be done, when would—

_ Take what you can carry, soldier.  _

Bucky held him close. 

“I’m not going to leave you,” he murmured when the sobs subsided.

What he didn’t say was that if he did, he’d leave quietly. 

Steve Rogers is not going to watch him die again. 

 

#

 

Before.   
Something in him stirred. A hollow feeling. A sensation that ate away at his insides and left nothing but ash and bones. It wasn’t right, wasn’t natural, but he knew better than to question it, knew better than to dwell on the wrongness and find someone who could fix things. 

He stepped toward Steve. 

No. 

He shouldn’t have done that. 

Because whatever was happening to him, Steve would have to watch. 

Would Steve be able to carry that? 

He was falling again. 

_ Don’t take him with you _ . 

“Steve?” he whispered. 

Steve turned, horrified. 

Bucky knew nothing else. 

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who wants to cry about infinity war or suggest fic ideas, my tumblr is such-geekiness :)


End file.
